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Intel, Unisys Partner On New Range of Servers
itwbennett writes "Unisys is primarily a services and consulting company with just a small amount of revenue coming from hardware, but they may be on to something new that could 'could give them a competitive advantage at a time when the big guns are a mess,' says Andy Patrizio. Unisys and Intel are are set to introduce on September 9 a new kind of secure computing platform designed to as a replacement platform for RISC systems running mission-critical cloud and big data workloads. 'It sounds funny to hear Intel talk about RISC migration since it is in the RISC business with the Itanium,' says Andy Patrizio, 'but at this point, what's left? HP was the driving force behind Itanium and it's in chaos right now. IBM has a healthy RISC business, so the target is obviously what's left of the Sun installed base.'"
They have had some interesting systems over the years, such as the ES7000 line.
Enterprise Servers: Unisys ES7000 Model 7600R G3 Enterprise Servers
Up to 8 sockets and 6 TB of memory with Red Hat and Suse support.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I worked for Unisys and one of its predecessors for 24 years. At the time Unisys was created -- Burroughs did a hostile takeover of Univac -- the combined company had some 130,000 employees; and about half of its business was with the U.S. military. Now the company has about 22,800 employees and seems to have no military business. I stuck with the company even when they started treating salaried software professionals as if they were hourly assembly-line workers. I stuck with them when they imposed an 18-month salary freeze that did not apply to executive bonuses. I left when it was obvious that any manager who brought new work to our site would be fired.
Unisys' existing mainframes already use Intel Xeon chips with FPGA coprocessors implementing their original mainframe ISA. So whatever they're about to unleash upon the world is likely to be a rehash of some current product. This sounds like pure marketing buzz.
Unisys is actually interesting because they're the last large vendor still selling a sign-magnitude machine and maintaining an accompanying C compiler, albeit they only adhere to the original C89 standard. But then again, so does Microsoft.
http://public.support.unisys.com/2200/docs/cp13.2/pdf/78310422-010.pdf
A char is 9 bits, short is 18 bits, int is 36 bits, long is 36 bits, and long long is 72 bits. unsigned has the same range as positive signed values. Addresses are in words, not byte offsets like on Intel.
Full C conformance actually requires a fair bit of costly emulation, so by default its disabled. For example, conversion from signed to unsigned is well-defined in C, but to get the specified behavior on a signed-magnitude implementation the compiler must emit code to compute the value, whereas on twos-complement the bit value is identical.